Sunday, March 07, 2010

More on aggression

An aggression score was calculated for MIDUS respondents based on the following items: is physically aggressive; enjoys upsetting and frightening others; enjoys scenes of violence; victimizes others for own advantage; will retaliate; is vindictive. Here are the means by ethnicity (sample size = 3,392):

* significantly higher than English-American womenWith the exception of Italian-American women compared to their English-American counterparts, none of the groups are significantly different. The Italian-English female gap is one-third of a standard deviation--a moderate difference.If we ignore the significance issue, the English-Swedish male gap is about as large. Overall, there does not appear to be wide variation among whites (or across races as shown in the last post). It is interesting that, like Chinese Americans in the last analysis, the 11 Asian Indians in the sample have a very high mean--7.82. It's significantly higher than the mean for all Americans. It's 1.5 standard deviations higher than the English-American mean--an enormous difference. (The Chinese mean for males from the last post is also roughly 1.5 sds above the mean for their English counterparts).

Profile

"The creation myth was the essential bond that held the tribe together. It provided its believers with a unique identity, commanded their fidelity, strengthened order, vouchsafed law, encouraged valor and sacrifice, and offered meaning to the cycles of life and death. No tribe could survive long without the meaning of its existence defined by a creation story. The option was to weaken, dissolve, and die." ~ E.O. Wilson